Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

In this post, there how to watch 360 videos on the Linux platform without the need for special technical magic. To do this, just use the package QMPlay 2, A player based on QT that fulfills its function very well. In addition to being versatile and effective, bringing an incredible amount of features for you to use, including touchscreen monitor recognition to navigate the video preview.

To watch 360 video, first press PLAYBACK the main menu, then choose VIDEO FILTERS, and finally enable the SPHERICAL VIEW option to use the 360 viewing function.

For testing, I provide my 360 video on the link below for download. And to finalize at the end a demonstration video of the software running as the installation links ONE CLICK INSTALL in my openSUSE repository.

On November 16th there was the release of openSUSE Leap 42.2. On November 24th, I had the opportunity to present openSUSE Project at school.

I was asked to make an introduction to FLOSS in general and more specific about openSUSE Project. The school was for middle aged people, for persons who quited school to work and conftibute financially to their families. There were 3 classes that they taught something computer related. It was a great opportunity for them to learn what FLOSS is and what makes openSUSE great Linux distro.(more…)

We are happy to announce that Ramadoni Ashudi design from Indonesia is selected as official logo for openSUSE.Asia Summit 2016 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. As the winner Ramadoni Ashudi will receive a “magic box” from the committee.
Ramadoni Ashudi submit two designs and his design-2 selected by 28 voters. His design depicts his version of Tugu Yogyakarta, a monument built by Sultan Hamengkubuwono I, the first King of Yogyakarta in 1755.
Ana Maria Martinez from Spain also submit her version of Tugu Yogyakarta and selected by 17 voters on the 2nd place.
On the 3rd place, Shawhong Ser from Thailand submit a design that showing Arjuna character from Wayang Kulit, a traditional Javanese shadow puppet. Arjuna is the 3rd Pandava Brothers from Mahabharata. It is selected by 9 voters.

The Conference started early on Saturday morning welcoming the participants and with the key note. Various presentations about open source software, hardware constructions and some workshops took place. Presentations such as Raspberry Pi arcade, openstack, OSGeo, ownCloud, Bitcoin and many more were quite interested by the visitors.

Greek openSUSE community was there with a booth and some presentations. On Saturday Alex P. Natsios presented “Enlightment on openSUSE”, an alternative GUI, and the other presentation was about “openQA”. Since openSUSE Leap 42.1 was very fresh, Alexandros Vennos took the opportunity to present what are openSUSE Leap 42.1 and Tumbleweed, the differences and what to install on what occasions. Presentation had title “openSUSE – Leaping Ahead”.

The booth was quite crowded. We had some left over DVDs of 13.2 but we proposed the visitors to install Leap 42.1. The question we were asked most was what is the difference between openSUSE Leap and Tubleweed and why to install and on what ocasion. We even created couple of bootable USBs from the ISOs of Leap. We had a Banana Pi running Tumbleweed with MATE playing a video loop of openSUSE Leap 42.1 KDE review. We gave almost all of our promo materials to the visitors since they were interested on openSUSE.

On 7-9 May 2015, Gnu/Linux Bogor (GLIB) in collaboration with the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Indonesia (Fasilkom UI) organized GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 at the Hall of the University of Indonesia, Depok. GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 is the eighth edition of the conference. According to the local committee this event attracted more than 322, users, developers, business professionals, media, students and government officials, including 48 speakers from all over the world. (http://2015.gnome.asia)

Many thanks to openSUSE/SUSE who willing to become one of the sponsor for this event. I organized some friends from Indonesia openSUSE community to make an openSUSE booth. We prepare several PC and RasPi for some demo and displaying openSUSE 13.2. I really appreciate the help from Andi Sugandi, Yan Arief Purwanto, and Adnan Kurniawan for their time in this event. Joey Li from SUSE Taiwan, Max Huang from Taiwan openSUSE community and Bin Li from China openSUSE community, also came and joint us on the event.

During 2 days (May 8-9) of the event our booth always full of visitor. They asked many questions regarding openSUSE and we tried to answer it directly as we can. We distributed around 200 DVD (openSUSE 13.2 x86_64) and stickers. We also make a short quiz/questionnaire and the top 30 people with highest answer will get a nice looking t-shirt on the 2nd day 🙂

The product is cool (any product) but here we have people. They should know WHY they join a community as volunteers. Is it because they want to help FLOSS to make the world a better place? Is it because it is Fun? Is it because they like the pros that open source provides? Is it because they like to help other people? Find out WHY people want to join-form a community.

The key to increase the number of the members is to attend to events. Here a quick tutorial how to do that. The best possible scenario is a developer to come to your booth and join the team. But this is 1% possible to happen (maybe less). Usually developers we’re searching, they have their favorite distro/project and they don’t change so easy.

The best thing is to join events where you can find end users (end users = users they’re computer science students where they focus on windows, users that their computer being used for facebook/twitter/office suite). Why? Because those users can do some work that the developers hate. What’s that?

0. Junior Jobs. Write a junior jobs list where someone can find exactly what to do and how to do it. The list could have the following.
1. Report bugs to bugzilla. So developers can fix it (of course developers have to be polite and help end users to provide possible broken data etc).
2. Documentation. Developers just hate to write documentation.
3. Translation. Usually developers use some “strange” language. So if someone asks you, please be polite and reply.
4. Promotion. Everyone call it marketing. The term marketing seems that the distro/project earns money out of promotion. Maybe the best term is engagement. This is needed because if it’s the best distro/project among others, how more potential users will learn about it? And if it’s the best, if no one uses it, then it’s useless.(more…)

Local open source community is bigger now and next step for you is to organise (or join) global conferences. One part of the organisation is the promotion of the conference. You want to have as many visitors as you can.

I will try to write down what I did during openSUSE global conferences and some local events.

BEFORE THE EVENT

0. Web page

There MUST be a web page and a system that accepts registration, paper submission, information etc. Write everything that visitor should know about the conference.
We use OSEM in openSUSE. Check out https://events.opensuse.org

1. Blog blog blog.

You’ll have some announcements for the conference. Dates, the place, new website, call for papers announcement, hotels that visitors can stay, schedule, keynote speakers etc. Usually, every open source project has a central blog or news site. You can write the articles there. Try to make fuzz by publishing your articles often.
Global communities can translate the announcements to their language and promote the conference locally.

Local communities are formed by members with blogs who publish on different planet sites. You can make a schedule so everyone can publish the announcement every other day. More eyes will see the announcement and will apply either as speaker or visitor.

Two things you want to have is contributors+visitors and sponsors. If your project is famous, then it’s easy. If not, then you better publish the initial announcement to magazines, newspapers, technical blogs-sites. If you don’t have access, then you better send it by e-mail or fax and then call them and ask them if they got the text. If they publish it, you’re lucky.

Translate those announcements and publish them, so local population will see that there’s a conference coming.

2. Promote to other FOSS conferences

There are plenty of FOSS conferences around the world.
* Community (local or global) has to apply for a booth and/or, if it’s possible, present why someone should attend.
* At the booth, you should have promo materials of your conference and give away to local LUGs or hackerspaces to hang posters at their places.
* Another cool thing is to have free coupons for beer at the conference. If beer isn’t the solution, then find another thing that can be found only at your conference and give free coupons.
* Wear special T-Shirts with the logo or #oSC or “Ask me for the conference”. You show people that you’re organizing something and can ask you questions.
* Finally, go to other project’s booth and invite them. You can ask them if they want to have a booth at your conference or apply for a presentation.

3. Messages to post

Create a list of messages you’ll post to social media.
First of all, you should post the announcements.
Then create a list of general messages that you should post before the conference. Content will be related to the subject of the conference or the country etc.
When you have the schedule ready, create a post with the name of the person (mention him/her on the social media), the title of the presentation (mention if it’s a famous project).
The messages can be 2-3 per day but not the same time. Try to have 4-5 hours time delay between tweets.(more…)

This is an attempt to make a list of things that someone-group of people can follow to develop a healthy community or team. This post is an overview of what I did with Kostas for the Greek openSUSE community.
A small detail is that we were only 2. So we took decisions fast. We didn’t have to vote or something.
We had an “advantage” because we have an awesome global community and we asked for something we weren’t sure how to proceed.

Let’s start:

0. Have a clear goal. What you want to do. Have a big goal that some parts aren’t “visible” when you start.
1. Web page: This is the web page-blog that will show information about community, the distro or the project. Make it visible on planets. BE CAREFUL. Don’t focus on how to make a great site-blog using personal wordpress, drupal etc. Set it up on blogger and start post articles. You want CONTENT (write an article every other day). Don’t spend time to maintain or secure your web page.
2. Mailing list: Ask the project if they can setup for you. If not, then try to find alternatives such as google groups.
3. IRC Channel
4. Forum: Prefer to ask from the project to setup a section for your language. If your project doesn’t have forum, then ask a LUG or tech forum to use their’s. Do not have your forum setup in your host for the same reasons as before. Don’t spend time to maintain or secure the forum.(more…)

We saw some ideas about how to organize a release party for your project (we like to party!!!). Another part of marketing is to join conferences to promote your project. I write some thought from my experience. Please, if you have any idea you want to share, be my guest.

1. Read the tech news
Read the news (RSS, social networks, mailing lists). There are many conferences that you can join (some conferences are annual). Unfortunately, the organizers might skip to sent you invitation because you’re either too small project without any marketing section or they forgot you for their reasons. You should contact them and ask them to join as community-project. Most conferences have call for papers period, where you can apply for a presentation.

2. Community Meetings
Now that you made the first contact, you should sent an e-mail to your project mailing list, informing them about the conference and asking for an IRC meeting. At the kick off meeting, someone MUST be the coordinator of everything (the tasks are following). Another thing that should be clear is how many members of the community will join. You have to decide early because you can book your trip and accommodation (if the conference is quite big, there won’t be any rooms available for you). Travel as a team. If you decide early, you can ask for sponsorship, like openSUSE Travel_Support_Program or GNOME Travel sponsorship (GNOME for smaller events).